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Review

Somewhere—perhaps in the netherworld, rats
gnawing on his kidneys, awaiting the arrival of his friend
Henry—Richard Nixon is smiling at the thought of being played by the
grave, sonorous, still-handsome Frank Langella. For all his attempted
gravitas, Nixon was a shifty-eyed lightweight and transparent phony,
whereas Langella is a born Shakespearean. Finally, Nixon has the
stature that eluded him in life!

In the film of his play Frost/Nixon,
Peter Morgan elevates the 1977 interviews Nixon gave (or, rather, sold,
for an unheard-of $600,000) to English TV personality David Frost into
a momentous event in the history of politics and media. His conceit is
to frame the whole spectacle as a championship boxing match with
coaches in each man’s corner (Kevin Bacon as Nixon man Jack Brennan,
Sam Rockwell and Oliver Platt as Team Frost’s James Reston Jr. and Bob
Zelnick). Frost and Nixon have one huge thing in common: They each need
a showbiz comeback. But Nixon’s object is to redeem himself (or,
failing that, run out the clock), Frost’s is to get Nixon to admit that
he was what he’d assured the American people he wasn’t (and would
never, thanks to Gerald Ford, be convicted of being): a crook. There’s
also a Rocky element: Will the playboy and gadabout Frost
(played by Michael Sheen) cram for the final interview on Watergate and
score a knockout, or will he let Nixon continue to talk circles around
him and win on points?

In the theater, Frost/Nixon
had the trappings of a Big Deal: Langella’s reverberant presence, a
sardonic narrator in Reston, and a bank of monitors that created a
tension between the live performance and its video translation. The
film, directed rather impersonally by Ron Howard, is brisk, well
crafted, and enjoyable enough, but the characters seem thinner (Sheen
is all frozen smiles and squirms) and the outcome less consequential.
As in Morgan’s screenplays for The Queen and Longford,
the theme is the collision of venerable authority figures and a modern
media that (in their view) cheapens and distorts everything that they
stand for. Does the camera trivialize—or does it pick up truths the
human eye rarely sees as starkly? Did it caricature Nixon, who loathed
it, or penetrate to his crooked soul? Resonant questions—but at this
point, why should we care that Frost salvaged a minor TV career by
getting the guilty-as-sin Nixon to acknowledge, after hours of prodding
for which he was exorbitantly compensated, that he “let the American
people down”? In terms of its impact on the electorate (and the
relations between politicians and the media), the Nixon-Frost
interviews have been dwarfed by the meeting of Katie Couric and Sarah
Palin, in which the interview subject was so surreally deficient that
routine follow-ups became “gotcha” questions. Even Nixon would have
been appalled.

Frost/Nixon
is unsatisfying even if, like me, you’re a lifelong aficionado of
Nixon-bashing. Morgan makes him out to be a Great White Whale, but when
he sat down with Frost, Nixon was already dead in the water—convicted
by his own words in White House transcripts to the point where even his
Republican allies had long deserted him. And with selective editing,
Morgan makes it seem as if Frost got Nixon to admit more than he
actually did. The original Watergate interview is now on DVD, and there
are self-exculpatory escape clauses in every interminable,
circumlocutory utterance. When Frost read aloud from the White House
transcripts, Nixon’s eyes darted around as he searched his brain for
linguistic loopholes. In Frost/Nixon, Langella’s heavy
features move slowly; he seems to be plumbing the depths of his soul
and glimpsing, for an instant, the abyss. Alas, the shit that dribbles
from Langella’s mouth is still Tricky Dick’s.
— David Edelstein